Cannabis, or marijuana, has proven
medical benefits and few, if any, toxic side-effects. Why, then, has it been a
prohibited medicine for over fifty years?

Medicinal cannabis, also known as medical
marijuana, is beginning to receive attention worldwide. Unfortunately, scare
tactics and misinformation surrounding the international 'war on drugs' continue
to dominate in the political and medical arenas, leaving many unwilling or
unable to think for themselves. Despite this, more people are discovering the
ability of marijuana, or cannabis, to relieve symptoms surrounding many medical
conditions.One of the pioneers of medicinal cannabis research is Dr Lester
Grinspoon, a professor at Harvard Medical School. In the last 30 years Dr
Grinspoon has researched and written many articles along with two books on the
cannabis controversy. Marihuana Reconsideredand Marihuana, The
Forbidden Medicine introduced many to the positive uses and benefits of one
of the oldest cultivated plants in the world.

In this interview with Dr Grinspoon, many topics
are discussed concerning the role of medicinal cannabis use in today's society.

J. Ray: What got you interested in
marijuana/cannabis?

Dr Grinspoon: In 1967, I had some unexpected
time so I thought I would look into marijuana to see what all the fuss was
about. I was convinced at the time that marijuana was a terribly dangerous drug.
I didn't understand why young people were ignoring the government's warnings
about its danger in using it. So, I spent the next three years doing research
and looking into it. I learned I had been brainwashed just like so many other
citizens in the United States.

While marijuana is not harmless, it is so much less
harmful than alcohol or tobacco that the only sensible way to deal with it is to
make it legally available in a controlled system. We can see this with alcohol
which is legally available to people over the age of 21 in the United States. I
put all this together in a book called Marihuana Reconsidered. It was
published in 1971 by Harvard University Press and was quite controversial at the
time. It has just been republished as a classic with a new introduction, 25
years later.

JR: In your research you found
marijuana/cannabis to be less harmful than tobacco or alcohol?

Dr G: I think cannabis is not harmless.
There is no such thing as a harmless drug. Cannabis is, by any criterion, less
harmful than either alcohol or tobacco. For example, tobacco costs the US about
425,000 lives every year; alcohol, perhaps 100,000 to 150,000 lives, not to
speak of all the other problems caused by alcohol use. With cannabis there has
not been a single case of a documented death due to its use. Now, of course,
death is not the only toxicity. It is the most profound one and certainly a
permanent one. If you look at it from the point of view of other toxicities,
again it comes out much better than either alcohol or tobacco. In fact, the
subject of our latest book, Marihuana, The Forbidden Medicine, looks at
cannabis from the point of view of a medicine. When cannabis regains the place
it once had in the US Pharmacopoeia it will be among the least toxic substances
in that whole compendium.

JR: It was in the US Pharmacopoeia in
the early 1900s?

Dr G: That is correct. Cannabis was a very
much used drug up until 1941 when it was dropped from the US
Pharmacopoeia. This was after the passage of the first of the draconian
US anti-marijuana laws in 1937, the Marihuana Tax Act. This Act made it
so difficult for physicians to prescribe cannabis that they just stopped using
it.

JR: Cannabinoid receptors were recently
discovered in the human brain. Are these cannabinoid receptors related to
cannabis and its medical uses?

Dr G: Very definitely. Some years ago it was
discovered by Dr Solomon Snyder that there are endogenous opioids; that is to
say, substances like opium that we produce in our bodies. It followed from that,
that there would be opioid receptors in our brains. It wasn't long afterwards
that a woman named Candace Pert discovered this. In other words, if you consider
a receptor as a kind of keyhole and the ligand or the neurotransmitter as the
key that opens it, the key has to fit into that receptor to open it.

With cannabis it came about the other way: the
receptor sites for cannabis were discovered first. I believe this was in 1990.
From this it was implied that there had to be an endogenous cannabinoid, a
ligand that would turn this receptor site on. Indeed, a couple of years later, a
man named W. A. Devane and his group discovered this ligand and they gave it the
name "anandamide", after the Sanskrit word ananda, which means "bliss".
Now there are many studies of these receptors and anandamide. It is clear that
these receptors are not just located in the brain but in various other organs in
the body as well.

I think we are going to see in the future that
these receptors play a very important part in the medicinal utility of cannabis.
Right now the clinical evidence is empirical and anecdotal but, in my view,
powerful enough to be translated into a policy which would allow people to use
cannabis legally for medicinal purposes.

JR: Do these recent discoveries contradict
past research that warned of brain damage from cannabis use?

Dr G: In my view, that kind of thing is in
the realm of myth and misinformation about cannabis. Think about it for a
minute. If the brain produces its own cannabinoid-like substances, it doesn't
make much sense that it would produce a substance which is going to damage the
brain. Indeed, long before it was discovered that there are endogenous
cannabinoids, the empirical evidence did not demonstrate that cannabis damaged
the brain.

There are a few studies which were methodically
unsound that the US Government and, specifically, NIDA, the National Institute
of Drug Abuse, and the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, focus on.

JR: Can you tell me something about the US
Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA?

Dr G: The predecessor agency of the DEA, the
Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was organised in 1930 by a man named Anslinger.
Anslinger undertook what he called a "great educational campaign", which
actually turned out to be a great disinformational campaign. This is symbolised
by one of the flagships of that campaign: the movie, Reefer Madness. If
you see the movie Reefer Madness today, even a person who is not very
sophisticated about marijuana will laugh at the grossness of the exaggerations
dramatised in that movie.

JR: Do you think pharmaceutical drug
companies have anything to do with the government's prohibitive stand against
medicinal cannabis use?

Dr G: Absolutely. The Partnership for a Drug
Free America has a budget of about a million dollars a day. A lot of that money
comes from drug companies and distilleries. You see, these companies and
distilleries have something to lose- the distilleries for obvious reasons. The
drug companies are not interested in marijuana as a medicine because the plant
cannot be patented. If you can't patent it, you can't make money on it. Their
only interest is a negative one. It will eventually displace some of their
pharmaceutical products.

Imagine a patient who requires cancer chemotherapy.
Now he can take the best of the anti-nausea drugs, which would be ondansetron.
He would pay about US$35 or $40 per 8-milligram pill and would then take three
or four of them for a treatment. Normally, he would take it orally, but people
with that kind of nausea often can't, so he would take it intravenously. The
cost of one treatment for that begins at US$600 because he will need a hospital
bed, etc. Or he can smoke perhaps half of a marijuana cigarette and receive
relief from the nausea.

Currently, marijuana on the streets is very
expensive. One can pay from US$200 to $600 an ounce. This is what I call the
prohibition tariff. When marijuana is available as a medicine, the cost would be
significantly less than other medications; it would cost about US$20 to $30 an
ounce. You can't tax it in the US because it is a medicine. So that would
translate out to maybe about 30 cents for a marijuana cigarette.

So our chemotherapy patient could get, many people
believe, better relief from the marijuana cigarette for 30 cents. This, in
comparison to the ondansetron which would cost at the very least US$160 a day
and, if he had to take it intravenously, more than US$600 per
treatment.

Well, if you multiply that by all of the symptoms
and syndromes we discuss in the book, Marihuana, The Forbidden Medicine,
then you can see that the drug companies will have something to lose here.

JR: Do you see this as a big obstacle in
changing drug policy here in North America?

Dr G: Well, it is certainly playing a part.
It is indirectly playing a part in the Partnership for a Drug Free America ads.
To say they are inaccurate is an understatement.

JR: Are we also talking about DARE, the Drug
Abuse Resistance Education program we see in many schools at this time?

Dr G: Oh yes, that is a terrible program.
Again, it is mis-educating children about drugs. It has now been established in a
major study that it doesn't do a bit of good. We're all worried about youngsters
doing drugs, but now DARE has been demonstrated not to do any good.

JR: In your book, Marihuana, The
Forbidden Medicine, there are many references to the medicinal uses of
cannabis. What are some of the medical problems you have seen medicinal cannabis
help?

Dr G: The most common cancer treatment in
the last couple of decades is with the cancer chemotherapeutic substances. A big
problem with some of these is the severe nausea and vomiting. It is the kind of
nausea that anybody who has not experienced it can only imagine. It is very
important that this nausea be defeated so patients can be reasonably comfortable
with this treatment. As I have mentioned, there are conventional drugs
available; it is just that cannabis is often the best.

Then there is glaucoma which is a disorder of
increased intraocular pressure in the eyes. If that pressure is not brought
down, glaucoma can eventually lead to blindness. There are conventional
medicines that work pretty well; but, for some people, cannabis works better and
with fewer side-effects.

Epilepsy is a disorder which has been treated by
cannabis for centuries. About 25 per cent of people in the US who have various
forms of epilepsy don't get good relief from the conventional medicines. Many of
them do get relief from one of the oldest anti-epileptic medicines,
cannabis.

Multiple sclerosis affects more than two million
people in the US, and one of its distressing symptoms is muscle spasm. It is
very painful. Anybody who has had a cramp while swimming will know what muscle
spasm pain is all about. Cannabis is very effective for the muscle spasms of not
only multiple sclerosis but also of paraplegia and quadriplegia.

Furthermore, cannabis helps people with MS who may
have trouble controlling their bladders. Cannabis is very helpful in reducing
this kind of loss of control. Not long ago I was in London doing a TV debate on
the topic of medicinal cannabis use. There was a woman in the audience who said
she had come down from Leeds, two-and-a-half hours on the train, to be in the
television audience. She has MS. The part that was so distressing for her was
the social embarrassment of losing control over her bladder. Well, she said
cannabis has restored her bladder control and she could now make the
two-and-a-half-hour trip from Leeds with no trouble.

Cannabis has been used for centuries in the
treatment of various kinds of chronic pain. It was used on the battlefields of
the Civil War as an analgesic medicine until morphine displaced it. Morphine was
much quicker for the pain and a much more powerful pain-reliever than cannabis.
Cannabis cannot defeat very powerful pain. The price of using morphine was that
many people suffered from what was then called "soldier's disease", which was
addiction to morphine.

Cannabis is very useful in the treatment of
migraine headaches. Sir William Osler, in his last textbook on medicine,
describes cannabis as the best single medicine for the treatment of the pain of
migraine.

The list is longer than that but I don't think you
want me to go on and on about this. One of the amazing things about cannabis is
its versatility. It has many uses. It is also remarkably non-toxic and it will
be quite inexpensive when it is not a prohibited substance. In my opinion,
cannabis will be seen as a wonder drug of the 1990s, much as penicillin was in
the 1940s.

JR: In your first book on cannabis,
Marihuana Reconsidered, you mentioned that the international drug-control
treaties, specifically the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs,
were not a serious obstacle to the legalization of cannabis. Do you still go
along with this?

Dr G: There is no question about it. There
is no serious obstacle. Treaties can be changed and I think the push to do that
will come from Europe. The interest in this is growing much more rapidly in
Europe than in the US. In fact, there is so much new information regarding
medicinal cannabis use that Yale University Press has asked us for a second
edition of Marihuana, The Forbidden Medicine. This book has been
translated into 10 languages, including Japanese.

Late in 1995 we received a letter from our German
publisher congratulating us on our seventh printing. They said our book has
begun a "robust debate on the medicinal use of marijuana in Germany". So, the
Europeans are way ahead of us, and I think the pressure will probably come from
them to make the necessary legal changes so cannabis can be used as a medicine
without interference. The present situation is just awful. These poor people who
use it as a medicine already have some degree of anxiety regarding their
disease. Another layer of anxiety is imposed on them by their government;
namely, they might get arrested or have their homes confiscated because they use
cannabis as a medicine.

JR: Do you think these international
treaties are what keep the 'war on drugs' alive?

Dr G: I think the Single Convention is not a
big obstacle, frankly. I think lots of people use that as an excuse, that we
can't do anything because of the Single Convention. I'm not an expert on it, but
the international lawyers I've talked to say this is not the problem. I think
the war on drugs is a much bigger thing than our discussion of medicinal
cannabis use. The 'war on drugs' is a much more complicated problem. If we stick
to the narrow agenda of medicinal cannabis use, I think putting pressure on our
government representatives and other people in powerful positions is the way.

People are learning about cannabis as a medicine.
Anybody who knows a person with AIDS who is dealing with the wasting syndrome
probably knows someone who has discovered that cannabis not only retards his
weight-loss but maybe helps him to regain weight. People who know patients with
multiple sclerosis, migraine, glaucoma who are using cannabis, begin to see that
it is a very useful medicine and they begin to wonder what all the fuss is
about. So I think people are getting educated.

The other thing that is happening that I think is
very hopeful is that doctors are getting educated. You see, doctors
usually get their drug education from drug companies or from pharmaceutical
company sales people who go around to doctors' offices, as well as from journal
articles, advertisements and promotional campaigns from these drug companies.
There are no drug companies interested in cannabis, so doctors don't learn much
about it. In my view, doctors have not only been mis-educated like so many other
people, but they have also been agents of that mis-education. What is happening
now is doctors are learning from patients. This is a new way for doctors to
learn about a new medicine. They learn lots of things from their patients, but
generally not about new medicines.

An example of this would be an AIDS patient who
started using cannabis for his wasting syndrome. Imagine him going into his
doctor's office and getting on the scales. The doctor knows he's been losing
weight all along and nothing that the doctor has given him has helped. Suddenly,
the doctor sees his patient has gained weight since the last visit and he asks,
"What's going on?" The patient says, "It is the cannabis I've been smoking: it
has helped me put on some weight." This makes a powerful impression on a doctor
who has been struggling to help his patient gain weight. Once this happens to a
doctor, his attitude begins to change.

JR: How can the average person work for
changes in the drug laws?

Dr G: Well, right now in the US, Congressman
Barney Frank of Massachusetts has introduced a bill to do just this; to make it
possible for people to use cannabis as a medicine. He needs co-sponsorship and
support for this bill. People who are interested in this can contact Barney
Frank or even their own representatives and ask them to support HR 2618, the
Bill for medical cannabis use for those in medical need.

JR: Is this a similar bill to what Newt
Gingrich and others had introduced into Congress in the early 1980s?

Dr G: It's the same bill. It is the McKinney
bill. I had suggested to Congressman Frank to expand the number of symptoms and
syndromes for which cannabis can be used. We know more about it than we did in
1982, but it is the same bill. Gingrich supported it then, but not
now.

JR: In February 1994 you and James Bakalar
wrote, "The War on Drugs: A Peace Proposal", published in The New England
Journal of Medicine. In it you talk about harm-reduction strategies in the
Netherlands and other countries. What do you think is holding back these
governments in North America from making the changes necessary for a truce in
the drug war, specifically in regards to medicinal cannabis use?

Dr G: Unfortunately, it is attitudes and
fears that are unwarranted. Take one harm-reduction approach; namely, clean
needles. Now, we've been saying for years that clean needles will reduce the
spread of AIDS among drug users. The IV drug users are the group spreading it
the most. There are people who are afraid of needle-exchange programs because
they think it will cause an increase in the use of intravenous drugs. I would
say this has been going on now for four or five years. Now the data is
overwhelming. It clearly demonstrates that exchanging needles does cut down the
spread of AIDS and it does not cause an increase in the use of these
drugs. It is so convincing that some local municipalities have gone ahead with
needle exchanges, but the Federal government and President Clinton are all dead
set against it. We could have saved a lot of people from AIDS by instituting
this policy of clean needles early on. Even now we are dragging our feet because
of this misapprehension about giving needles out. Ignorance and fear are not
always corrected by data. The data on needle exchange is compelling whether it's
from Australia, New Haven or wherever. There is no question. You would think
when you have this kind of data it would be translated into social policy,
considering the cost of AIDS in human suffering. But we're having an awful tough
time persuading the authorities that we should go full steam ahead with needle
exchange.

There is an attitude here in the US that the only
way to treat anyone using a drug not approved of is to treat them as a criminal.
Many of these people even go to jail. The costs of criminalizing these people
have been extreme. Since I started my work on marijuana in 1967, more than 10
million Americans have been arrested on marijuana charges in the US. In 1994,
the year for which we have the latest FBI data on this, 483,000 Americans were
arrested on marijuana charges. That is just extraordinary when you consider that
cannabis imposes less harm on the individual and on society than either alcohol
or tobacco.

JR: What kind of feedback did you receive
from your June 1995 article, "Marihuana as Medicine", in JAMA?

Dr G: Well, that article caused a lot of
fuss. It was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association
(JAMA). This organization has been steadfast in its opposition to
marijuana for 50 years-since an editorial published in 1945. Although the AMA
doesn't say so officially, I think publishing our article signals a growing
change in physicians' attitudes towards medicinal cannabis. There were
physicians who wrote me nasty letters. More impressive were the many physicians
who shared their stories about how they learned about cannabis from seeing how
it helped a particular patient. Several of them said we ought to have an organization, a physicians'
organization, for the medical use of marijuana. The
article created a stir not just in this country. I think JAMA is
published in 33 languages. It was no small wonder that there was a lot of mail
from other parts of the world as well.

JR: Was the feedback mostly
positive?

Dr G: Absolutely. By far, most of it was
positive. There were some nasty letters, but I have received those from the time
I first published Marihuana Reconsidered. The first letter I received was
a very nasty letter. As the years go on, though, the mail gets much more
positive.

JR: What do you see for the future of
medicinal cannabis use?

Dr G: It strikes me that there are a lot of
parallels with the discovery of penicillin. Penicillin was discovered by a man
named Alexander Fleming in 1928. He had gone off for summer vacation and left a
Petri dish out in his laboratory. When he came back, the Petri dish was just
covered with Staphylococcus, except for an area surrounding what looked
like a little island of mould. He looked into it and found that the mould was
giving off a substance which he called "penicillin". It was killing the
Staphylococcus. Yet his discovery was ignored until 1941. For over a
decade his publication was ignored, until the pressure of World War II
highlighted the need for antibacterial substances other than sulphonamides. Then
a couple of investigators did a study with just six patients and demonstrated it
was a good antibiotic.

Penicillin became very inexpensive to produce. It
was clear that penicillin was not toxic and it was very versatile as a drug. It
was used in the treatment of many different kinds of infectious diseases. It
became the wonder drug of the 1940s.

When cannabis can be produced as a medicine it will
be very inexpensive. I have already listed some of the reasons why it can be
said to be versatile, and, the government position notwithstanding, it is
remarkably non-toxic. It has exactly the same three characteristics that made
penicillin a wonder drug. These are some of the reasons I believe that, in the
late 1990s, cannabis is going to be recognized as a wonder drug.

For more information on the DARE school programs,
here is a list of articles and world wide web addresses:Harmon, Michele
Alicia, "Reducing the Risk of Drug Involvement Among Early Adolescents: An
Evaluation of Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE)", Institute of Criminal
Justice and Criminology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA,
April 1993.Web address: http://turnpike.net/~jnr/dareeval.htm

About the Interviewee:Dr Lester
Grinspoon is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School.
He has published over 140 papers and 12 books. His major area of interest has
been 'illicit' drugs. His first book, Marihuana Reconsidered, was
published in 1971 by Harvard University Press and republished in 1994 as a
classic. He has written books on amphetamines, cocaine and psychedelic drugs. In
1990 he won the Alfred R. Lindesmith Award of the Drug Policy Foundation for
"Achievement in the field of drug scholarship". Marihuana, The Forbidden
Medicine, Dr Grinspoon's latest book, written with James Bakalar, has been
translated into 10 languages. A second edition is now in press. [Copies of
Marihuana, The Forbidden Medicine, can be ordered from the Publicity
Department, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, USA, phone +1 (203)
432 0971.]

About the Interviewer:Jana Ray is a
freelance writer and community radio personality who works to educate the public
about humane alternatives to the global war on drugs. Harm-reduction strategies,
legal medicinal cannabis use, drug law reform and the preservation of everyone's
human rights are fundamental principles guiding her work. Since 1992, Jana has
been an active member of the British Columbia Anti-Prohibition League which
represents various west Canadian groups. BCAPL advocates public/government
recognition of the individual's natural, human and legal right to determine
personally his/her own religion, lifestyle and consumption.

HEMP / Cannabis Marijuana was
outlawed directly by the Freemasons in this country and internationally for the
sole purpose of creating synthetic petrochemical and pharmaceutical alternatives
that they could sell through multinational corporations they control, at highly
inflated prices. Back in the 1930's Dupont had a patent on a synthetic chemical
compound that breaks down wood pulp for making paper from trees. You didn't need
to cut down trees to make paper because for thousands of years virtually all
known paper was made from Hemp and it can be produced at 1/4 the cost, 1/5 the
pollution it's 10 times stronger and lasts 10 times longer.Even
the Founding Father Masons knew this. The Declaration of Independence was
printed on Hemp Paper as well as the Constitution. The Flag sown by Betsy
Ross was made out of Hemp. The soldiers clothes in the Revolutionary War were
made out of Hemp and so were the covered wagons of the early settlers. Canvas is
Dutch for Cannabis.

BUT, when the FREEMASONS find
it in their interest to get rid of something for profit and power, it doesn't
matter if GOD put it there, it won't get in the way of business as usual for the
FREEMASONS. Cannabis seed oil is a machine-grade lubricant which is natural and
NON-PETROLEUM based. It is also FREE and doesn't need to be DRILLED OUT OF THE
EARTH with expensive polluting machinery.

COTTON could never in it's
wildest fantasies compete with HEMP. HEMP is far SUPERIOR. It is 26 times
stronger and lasts 10 times longer than cotton. There are NO chemicals needed to
produce Hemp whereas you need HALF of all the chemicals produced to grow cotton.
Hemp has NO natural
enemies except the government and you need pesticides to grow cotton. The 1st
levi jeans were not made out of Cotton, they were made out of HEMP / Marijuana.

By now, you're probably wondering how this all
fits in with the Freemasons.

(A) Dupont's chief financial backer was Andrew
Mellon of the Mellon Bank of Pittsburgh, in which he was the owner and largest
stockholder. Mellon, in his role as Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury, in 1931
appointed his future nephew-in-law Harry J. Anslinger to be head of the newly
reorganized Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which evolved into
the DEA. Anslinger was one of the main proponents of criminalization of Hemp /
Marijuana. William Randolph Hearst newspaper chain promoted "yellow
journalism" using racism and lies to turn the public's mind on what they
called a "new drug threat". Weyerhauser (Skull and Bones) and their
control of the Lumber Industry

(B) Medicine and Pharmaceuticals : In 1900
Percy Rockefeller was initiated into Skull and Bones. The Rockefeller Family has
always controlled the American Medical Association (AMA) since the very
beginning. When originally consulted on this issue in the 1930's the AMA was all
for Cannabis Tinctures / Marijuana Medicine, but for some reason their stance
changed. Anslinger had blackmailed the AMA!! Anslinger was responsible for
prosecuting the doctor's that prescribed narcotic drugs for "illegal
purposes". The FBN had prosecuted more than 3000 AMA doctors for illegal
prescriptions through 1939. In 1939, the AMA made specific "peace"
with Anslinger over marijuana and the result was that only 3 doctor's were
prosecuted over the next 10 years!!

(C) Cotton : The Decorticator had just been
discussed in popular mechanics in 1938 as a new method of harvesting Hemp which
would promise to put cotton back in it's place as an inferior material. New
technology was allowing cotton to get an edge up on Hemp at this time. Well Eli
Whitney has always been famous for the "Cotton Gin" and the Whitneys
again had an interest in preserving their empire. Surrounding the entirety of
Marijuana Criminalization there are Freemasons in the background keeping society
from progress while promoting their own personal financial agenda.

(D) Petrochemicals and Oil : Rockefeller has
always been involved with the Mason groups but they are a lower-level power
family. Actually, the Whitney's (BIG TIME Skull and
Bones Family) were the real power behind Standard Oil. "Harry Payne
Whitney (Initiated into Skull and Bones in 1894) inherited two Standard Oil
fortunes from both the Payne and the Whitney families. William Collins Whitney
married Flora Payne, daughter of Standard Oil Treasurer Oliver Payne. The Paynes
are not in Skull and Bones, but adding the Payne piece of the Standard Oil
fortune made Whitney's fortune that much larger. A quote by Lammott Dupont
(President of Dupont) in the 1930's: "Synthetic plastics find application
in fabricating a wide variety of articles, many of which in the past were made
from natural products," ..."Consider our natural resources. The
chemist has aided in conserving natural resources by developing synthetic
products to supplement or wholly replace natural products". -Popular
Mechanics--June 1939